A New Raspberry Pi Imager

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/a-new-raspberry-pi-imager/

by raus22 • 8 months ago

70 19 8 months ago

raspberrypi.com

Mr_Eri_Atlov• 8 months ago

A fairly useful update!

Raspberry Pi continues to show that its real value is in continuous software and community support.

Even if their hardware isn't the greatest value, the software always shines.

mschuster912• 8 months ago

What about manual pre-provisioning? I just found out a few days ago that you can't pre-provision wifi via placing wpa_supplicant.conf in /boot any more, you now need to use that GUI provisioner.

I appreciate that RPi is trying to make the ecosystem more accessible for newcomers - but not at the cost of power users, please!

giobox• 8 months ago

I had to go and read the docs to confirm this was true, I'm really surprised this has been removed (since Raspian Bookworm apparently). It was a ridiculously common way to configure wifi on RPis over the last decade!

It's the little paper cuts like this that really hurt on a platform who's original aims were to target the education market, there is still a mountain of tutorials online advising to drop in that file for wifi setup.

fn-mote• 8 months ago

a mountain of tutorials online advising to drop in that file for wifi

Cannot emphasize this enough. People with barely enough knowledge (“script kiddies” so to speak) are configuring and using RPi’s. They just want to follow the tutorial and get it working so they can do what they really want. (Eg image processing or run their 3D printer.) Nothing against this kind of user. I help them when, but…

This creates a situation where “the wrong tutorial” problem is unnecessarily easy to stumble on.

supercoffee• 8 months ago

I recently needed to create some heavily customized pi images for a fleet of Iot devices. I came across this tool that did the job nicely. Only downside is that it only works on Linux.

https://github.com/gitbls/sdm

exasperaited2• 8 months ago

Good news:

rpi-imager --cli

Has really expanded options over the previous versions.

Including:

--first-run-script <first-run-script> --cloudinit-userdata <cloudinit-userdata> --cloudinit-networkconfig <cloudinit-networkconfig>

Though it doesn't support the old simple config text file, presumably most of that is replaced by cloudinit network config.

I am guessing this is available in the Windows version. I am seeing this from the macOS binary.

mschuster912• 8 months ago

Yeah but I really really don't like tools doing black magic to be honest, I'd like some documentation what it does. And if it is just cloud-init, no big deal, I already know more than I'd ever wanted about this particular piece of annoyance from wrestling with AWS, just tell me what exactly the Pi userland expects me to hand to cloud-init...

Thanks anyway for digging into the source, really appreciated!

pm• 8 months ago

I don't think wpa_supplicant.conf has been used for sometime, as they moved to cloud-init for bootstrapping. It requires the network-config file instead, the format of which is documented on the cloud-init documentation page.

I happen to have been experimenting with this for the past few weeks, and the most persistent issue was getting wi-fi to work correctly. It's quite a common issue, with any number of hacks. I offer my own network-config below, though I've only tested it with provisioning Ubuntu Server on the RPis so far (I have two 3B+s).

  network:
    version: 2
    renderer: networkd
    wifis:
      wlan0:
        regulatory-domain: "AU"
        dhcp4: true
        dhcp6: false
        optional: false
        access-points:
          "<access-point-name>":
            password: "<password>"

The important parts are:

1. The renderer, as the default is NetworkManager, which doesn't work correctly with RPis (at least on Ubuntu Server). It may work with RPiOS, but I haven't tested it yet.

2. The regulatory domain, the lack of which is what disables wi-fi in the first place. I forget how much testing I did with the format, but I believe it must be uppercase (I don't remember about quoting the string, however).

3. Disabling IPv6 may be relevant, though unlikely. It was just in a working configurations I found; I just haven't had time to confirm it. The relevant line in my user-data file is as follows:

  bootcmd:
  - sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1

The rest of the configuration is standard, though I purposefully made the wi-fi non-optional so I could confirm that wi-fi worked (my only Internet at the moment is through my iPhone hotspot, which was another source of issues, but that's a whole other story).

NB. According to someone else, the imager has the respective command line options for user-data and network-config, which I didn't know.

ahepp3• 8 months ago

I've been using buildroot for my Pis, and adding a config script to /etc/init.d that can copy over whatever config files you want from /boot

risyachka• 8 months ago

Had no idea it just came out! Was using it today to install os on my old raspberry and ux was very smooth!

sq_2• 8 months ago

Raspberry Pi seems to have been on a tear of good stuff this year. Lots of activity on both the hardware accessory and software side. I've been following their secure boot provisioning work in particular.

Conveniently for me, they keep releasing things right as I start to have an interest in using that thing.

nodesocket• 8 months ago

Awesome news. I actually use Raspberry Pi Imager to create bootable thumb drives for Debian and TrueNAS on MacOS. Works great.

sshine• 8 months ago

I've been very happy with nixos-generators:

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

They let you produce SD-card images with custom NixOS'es.

Very useful when you want an exact software layout, and exact system settings, like what user accounts and SSH keys to include, what systemd services should run, what directories should be tmpfs, and how to interact with the local network using avahi.

A New Raspberry Pi Imager

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